Leaping From The Box

My husband and I believe voting is something you just do as an American. I do not think we have missed a Presidential election since either of us was able to vote. I know I haven’t. I realized this year is the first Presidential election in which I have not had a Bush or Clinton as a choice on the ballot! Does that tell you how old I am?

Last week we participated in Early Voting in Tallahassee, Florida, which I wrote about over at Musings, Mischief and Mayhem, my personal blog.

What I liked best about early voting was that it enabled my family to spend a glorious October afternoon enjoying the sunny outdoors while we waited in line. I used to take my children with me to vote when they were younger, preteens, but I never thought I would have the privilege of actually voting with them. Here are a few things I learned from my family that afternoon:

1. You can count up to 31 binary on one hand. You have to be careful about the number 4, though, as some people might take offense at the finger being used.
2. David knows binary, but still cannot reliably tell the difference between XIV and XVI.
3. Traffic jams occur even if people are driving all the same speed on a track and there are no accidents. The drivers will at some point come to a complete stop.
4. My husband thinks is something morally wrong with electioneering along the voting line, even if they are outside the legal perimeter.
5. Everyone in our vehicle except me noticed that we went down a level in the parking garage while looking for a space, even though I was the one driving.
6. You can avoid shaking a politician’s hand if you tell him that you are coming down with a cold and are probably contagious!

If you haven’t already early voted or absentee voted, go vote tomorrow. It doesn’t matter for whom, it just matters that you vote!!

Are you one of those lucky few who have never experienced homeschool burnout? I went through at least two sessions of homeschool burnout during the twelve years we actively homeschooled, probably more (time has a way of blurring those days/weeks you would like to forget). You would think an unschooler would have no reason for burnout, wouldn’t you? But even unschoolers can have expectations both for themselves and their children that are sometimes unrealistic or unattainable. Unschooling moms are not immune to placing tremendous pressure upon themselves in the same ways that all moms do around the world.

Life Burnout

You might wonder how I could experience burnout when I am no longer really homeschooling. Ah, but you forget, I now have a very active toddler living here! And toddlers have been known to cause life burnout, which is exactly the variety of burnout I just went through. Not that it was the toddler’s fault! She really is a wonderful little girl and I love having her here and am grateful we are able to provide her and her mommy a safe place to land … most of the time, anyway.

It’s just that I have taken care of children for over twenty-three years now. With our last child graduating in May I though that time of my life was done and I had been eagerly anticipating doing some new things, something that did not necessarily involve children! I had also become used to quieter days and being able to pick up and go as I wished, when I wished. Suddenly I was thrust back into those toddler years where you plan around naps and diaper changes and such. Talk about a big change!

Add to that all the other changes that have occurred in our lives the last two to three years – children moving in, children moving out, weddings, the birth of our first grandchild, moving to another state, my father’s health issues – and you can see that my life has been more than a little eventful recently. Normally I am pretty even tempered and adapt to the highs and lows that life throws my way quickly and easily. But suddenly it felt like more than I could handle.

Signs of Burnout

About mid-July I began to realize that I was not adapting as easily as I would have anticipated and by August the signs of a full-blown Life Burnout were readily apparent:

• Extreme tiredness
• Snapping at people for no reason
• Mentally running through the list of the negatives in my life over and over
• Physically aching all over
• Feeling overwhelmed and frustrated
• Eating too much junk food
• No interest in activities that I usually enjoy, such as crocheting and writing

Dealing With The Physical

It is one thing to recognize the signs, though, and quite another to begin doing something about them. Thankfully I realized that one thing I could easily do was begin to take my vitamins again. I am very good at reminding others in my family to take their vitamins, but not so good at remembering to take them myself. To be honest, in the past I never really noticed much difference in how I felt whether I took them or not. But as I near the half century mark, I find that I now notice a big difference and I do need to take them, especially my B-Complex and Omega’s. After just two weeks of starting back on a daily supplements regime, including a new packet of vitamins designed especially for women my age, I began to have more energy and the physical exhaustion eased.

The next step was to cut out the junk food, which was easy enough since I am the one who buys the groceries. If you don’t buy it and don’t have it in the house, it is much easier to avoid. Instead, I stocked up on fresh vegetables and fruit and snacked on them whenever I had the munchies. And I renewed my efforts to not drink soda, since I do not believe the corn syrup in soft drinks is good for us. Even though I love the taste of root beer, it does not quench my thirst but instead leaves me wanting more, which is not really the intended result of drinking a liquid, unless, of course, you are the manufacturer of that liquid and wish the consumer to purchase more! So I went back to drinking mostly water, which I like to drink, and my hot tea and morning cup of mocha. I still have the occasional soda, maybe one or two a week, but not on a daily basis.

Tackling The Mental

Once I began to feel better physically, it was easier to deal with the mental stuff. I knew I needed to pare back my expectations of what I could accomplish each day. I spend a lot of time each day working on this blog and my website: writing new posts, updating old articles, checking links, adding new information. Caring for a toddler means a lot of distractions and those distractions make writing new material an almost impossible task for me. So instead of writing, I focused on the areas I could do more easily with distractions, which is checking and updating links. Doing so immediately lowered my levels of stress and frustration and increased my enjoyment in my granddaughter again.

Along the way I made an interesting discovery. By lowering my expectations, I actually accomplish more. Of course, this doesn’t happen every day, but often enough to be encouraging.

Surviving Burnout

Burnout is survivable. The key is recognizing burnout for what it is, an overload in a particular area, whether homeschooling, life, expectations, whatever, and then taking steps to reduce that overload. Many times those steps mean changing our own expectations of ourselves, our children, our lives. We are not SuperParents. Life will sometimes throw us a curveball or two and we have to step back, regroup, and start again.

How do I know that I have survived burnout this time around? By my renewed interest in crocheting and writing, which I do purely for my own enjoyment. I decided not to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this coming November, but I have been thinking about brushing the dust off an old novel attempt and working a bit more on it. And my current crochet project, a Celtic-design wedding afghan for my son, is exciting the heck out of me! I would like to do nothing more than sit for hours working on it. My passion is back! Burnout is gone! I survived, again!

Homeschool Burnout

If you would like to know more about Homeschooling Burnout – what it is, what causes it, how to conquer it – please read my article, Surviving Homeschool Burnout.

Have you survived burnout, whether Life or Homeschooling? If so, how did you do it? And what did you learn from your burnout?

We have heard so much about the S-word (socialization) and homeschooling. People who send their children to public schools always bring it up, seeming to imply that homeschooled children sit at home in the dark all day like so many mushrooms. I recently read a very interesting article in the February 2008 issue of Psychology Today, however, that presents some strongly worded criticisms in the reverse direction.

In the article Skinny Sweepstakes By Hara Estroff Marano the author describes some of the social problems that kids face, starting in middle school. For example, psychotherapist Steven Levenkron observes that these days “…the adults essentially outsource parenting.” RAND scholar “Richard Hersh calls it the culture of neglect: kids grow up overly dependent on their peers-‘in essence, kids raising kids’ – without developing a strong sense of self.” He goes on to explain how kids need to be mentored by caring and demanding adults. On the other hand, he also realizes that adults should not see kids as helpless and shelter them from a wide range of experiences. It is sometimes a delicate balance, but one that homeschooling parents have a great deal of experience with.

The author of the article examines how schools and colleges are set up to contribute to eating disorders, anxiety and depression, through artificially restricting students to same-age peer groups. Although the thrust of the article centers on eating disorders, the message comes through loud and clear that as schools become more and more homogeneous in age, and often in culture and class, kids are getting a very skewed idea of what the world is all about.

Think about how schools have changed. My grandmother taught in a one-roomed school in the 1920’s, where children of all ages interacted with one another. Over time, the schools have gotten larger and larger and the age range at a given institution has gotten narrower and narrower. Even the local university now boasts that it has classes for seniors, conveniently located at the town library so no seniors actually enter campus.

What options do you have when sending your child off to college? This article indicates that the greater the diversity in age per grade level, the better off your young person will be. One option to consider is a community college. Community colleges often have students enrolled from a larger diversity of backgrounds, both age and cultural. The average student age is higher than at your typical university, which means the students definitely bring a wider range of life experiences into the classroom.

So, next time your ten-year-old spends half an hour talking to the librarian and you are ready to go, be glad that he or she gets to spend time in the real world interacting with people other than only peers.